It’s not surprising that a world of sound and fury would produce a widespread sense that none of it signifies. Nor is it surprising that in such a world, devoted to spectacle and stripped of purpose, every institution has a “mission statement.”
On paper, the idea of a mission statement makes sense, in the sense that it seems sensible to have one. Institutions, including and perhaps especially institutions of higher education, have to bind individuals with disparate motives into a group that pursues a common aim. People have to know what that aim is if they’re going to work together, and one way to make it clear is to put it into words. I think there are better ways to clarify your mission, and that the form of the mission statement often obscures what it claims to make plain. Better to speak softly and carry a big stick. But put that quibble aside. I come not to bury the traditional mission statement, but to praise the basically sound intuition that institutions without missions don’t survive. More importantly, institutions without missions won’t survive what’s coming.
“What’s coming” is what Ross Douthat recently described as a “bottleneck.” In evolution, a bottleneck is an event, such as an environmental disaster, that drastically reduces the size and diversity of a population. Douthat borrows the concept to describe the effect of digital technologies, which are producing “a period of rapid pressure that threatens cultures, customs, and peoples with extinction.” The key to surviving this period, he argues, will be “intentionality and intensity. Any aspect of human culture that people assume gets transmitted automatically, without too much conscious deliberation, is what online slang calls NGMI – not going to make it.” In other words – if you’ll allow a bit of boardroom slang – the only institutions that are going to make it will be what they call “mission-driven.” But I think the mission will have to change.
Take, for example, my own university’s mission statement. Among several other things, we here at the University of Dubuque aim to nurture “relationships which encourage intellectual, spiritual, and moral development” and “excellence in academic inquiry and professional preparation.” Though I may have some problems with the usual conceptions of “professional preparation,” I certainly do hope we will graduate professionals who have been prepared by genuine inquiry and real human relationships for “life-long learning and service” (another item in our statement). Such is the proper mission of any university. The problem is that this mission is meaningless outside a certain context – a set of habits and mindsets that make it possible to “inquire” and to form “relationships.” Without these habits, and mindsets, we can still use words like “inquiry” and “relationships,” but we will not really be “inquiring,” and our “relationships” will be unreal.
But context – as opposed to text – is by its nature unarticulated, which means it is easily taken for granted. The context is what makes the text of our mission statements make sense. And it is the context, not the text, that is passing through the “bottleneck.” If our missions (as opposed to our mission statements) are going to survive, we will have to make it our explicit mission to preserve, with “intentionality and intensity,” the context itself. If we do not, we will find ourselves in a classic cargo cult – a religion of magical thinking in which our actions become nonsensical because they are divorced from the larger practice that made them meaningful. We’ll be stuck in the kayfabe.
To preserve the context, we will first of all have to get better at seeing it and saying what it is. Articulating context is traditionally the work of the humanities, and this might be reason for optimism, since that work is traditionally done in-house. But I’m not sure humanities professors are going to save higher ed from AI (especially when they’re cheerleading the chatbots). Many are simply too professionalized to do the work. We’re hyperspecialists in the texts of our fields, trained by our graduate programs to do our part by ignoring the whole, even and especially when our “part” is to place those texts “in context,” be it literature or history or philosophy or whatever. But the work of preserving the cultural context in which that intellectual work makes sense can only be done by turning our granular attentions from our books, which for many of us contain the world, to our world, which is less and less able to contain our books.
Many in the humanities today are already more activist than bookworm. Their critics might suggest that if anything they are too focused on “putting texts in context,” usually in order to deconstruct them, and that the mission of higher education would be better served if they thought less about changing the world and more about teaching their subject. I agree with some of that critique, but we’re well past canon wars at this point. The question isn’t what people are going to read on the other side of the bottleneck; it’s whether they’re going to read anything at all. If you want a perfect example of not getting it, consider the conservatives complaining about books assigned in K-12 schools, and the liberals complaining about book-bans. How can either side keep pretending that the problem is with what students are reading? The world in which that debate made sense no longer exists. Even at elite universities, nobody reads books anymore.
The real mission of any university now is to build a little world – something like a monastery – in which the kinds of activities described in its mission statement remain possible because they remain meaningful. Monasteries, of course, have Rules of Life. If we care about things like “inquiry,” we’ll have to carefully inquire into the arrangement of social life on campus, and we’ll need to think imaginatively about how it might need to be rearranged if we want to survive the bottleneck.
I’ve written about one of my own experiments. A “tech-free dorm” may seem ambitious, but we ought to set our sights even higher. At the very least, a Rule of Life ought to include a general ban on phones in class; this should not be left up to individual professors. We should also consider banning phones not just in class but at other campus events and venues. Several major artists and some concert venues now require people to put their phones in locked pouches; it is striking that institutions devoted not to entertainment but to learning have not done the same. More and more K-12 districts are banning phones on their campuses; ultimately Christian universities should consider prohibiting the possession of smartphones altogether.
The image of the monastery opens up a strange possibility. After the fall of the Western empire, Christian cloisters played a crucial role in preserving the ancient texts of Greece and Rome. Without them, much of the secular learning that we now take for granted as part of our common cultural inheritance would not have survived the bottleneck that was once called (evocatively, if not fairly) “the Dark Ages.” If we are indeed entering a “new dark age” – one full of “shining devices” and for that reason mostly empty of literate persons – then Christian institutions today may have a similar mission to fulfill: saving the best of the secular world from the new bottleneck of technological “progress.” Maybe in the future it will only be students at Christian universities who read Freud and Marx and Nietzche and all the other great anti-Christian thinkers, because it will only be students at Christian universities who still read anything at all.
